Alright, so I’ll get laughed at here, but one of my ‘goals’ for work this year is I wanted to take the 4 hour VBA course on youtube and then write a small program after it that does something.
Before you laugh at me using an outdated language, I only chose it because a co worker suggested learning it, and we do use some VBA coded macros in our spreadsheets. We’re not a very up to date company.
The reason I never get anything done with learning programming is I never know what to do . And if I do come up with something to do, it will be WAYY too complex over my head, i’ll fail at it, then never touch it again. If it’s too simple, I won’t even want to bother. (Yay ADHD)
So I’m just looking for a couple suggestions for a fun little program to make (and consider the goal ‘done’). I know calculators of some sort are an option…I can’t really think of anything else. I guess it doesn’t actually have to be a useful program but it would be cool if it was.
At work, if you already have an existing workflow or process that’s repetitive and you have some level of familiarity with, start with that. You will already be clear about the outcomes you want.
VBA is nice in that since you are manipulating an Office product (usually Excel), you get to see what your code actually does in “real-time”. Running the code line by line (Debug mode IIRC) helps.
Don’t worry about it being “old”, it’s still useful in most corporate settings and like others have said, much of the concepts are transferrable. Myself I went on from VBA to other Microsoft products like Power Query and DAX.
One word of advice, always work on copies! Treat VBA processes as destructive and non-reversible!!! Last thing you want is to mangle “live” files beyond repair…
Have fun :)